One Room Challenge: The Patio Before

It’s been a year exactly since I tackled our guest suite makeover- a space that I have been grateful for every single day of this pandemic and also a project to end all projects. I mean that quite literally. I was so exhausted from that one that I needed a good long break before taking on anything major for a while. While the last challenge was all about creating a space where we could retreat from the world and lean into working, schooling, just generally existing from home with two small children, this one is about expanding our world a little. After over a year of our little bubble, now that we’re vaccinated and San Francisco is slowly opening up, we want to create a space where we can safely entertain friends and visiting family.

Enter the backyard. After years of juggling kids and dogs without one, we feel very fortunate to have a yard in the city, but it is a mess. We are in part to blame for this. I have a habit of being unable to walk away from plants, and when my carefully planned out raised beds can’t accommodate them, they end up in pots. Are any of you like this? Pots are taking over the patio. They take up nearly as much square footage as the furniture, and they leave it feeling cluttered. The yard is also where my kids spend a good portion of the day, so it is constantly covered in bright plastic-y toys, big ones like the water table and scooter, and smaller offenders like the sand toys that somehow end up everywhere except for the sandbox. Ah, yes, the sandbox. The “cedar” sandbox has been an absolute lifesaver for keeping my toddler entertained but is also stained the most unnaturally bright shade of orange/red because who wouldn’t want a sandbox to be the focal point of their yard? As for the rest of it, the fence is rotting and sagging from years of neglect, our “eco-lawn” needs reseeding and is struggling to survive, and the furniture is an unfortunate mishmash of the pieces we had carefully selected to fit the balcony of our last place and a few budget pieces that we picked up to fill in the gaps that haven’t weathered well.

To be honest, going through the before pictures feels overwhelming and a little embarrassing, but the only way to go from here is up. We have a lot to tackle. We’re planning to start with replacing the fence, refinishing the deck, and creating some much-needed storage so we have a nice clean blank slate to work from then the real fun can begin. Check back next week to see what we have planned, and if you want to see it unfold in (mostly) real-time, follow me on Instagram.

Thanks for following along, you can check out what the rest of the participants are up to over on the One Room Challenge blog!